Perhaps because his heart wasn’t in it or because he and his twin loved each other too much, their ritual failed. This is because his ritual was one of the rare failures of the Crimson Sacrifice.
Seeing Mio and interpreting her as Yae, Itsuki begs her to find her twin Sae and leave that place before the sacrifice can be initiated, even though he knows that the failure of the ritual has real, tangible consequences for his people. He is helpful, mournful, but, much to Mio’s dismay, just another spirit, his hair turned white from the trauma of murdering his younger twin. Early into the hunt for her sister, Mio comes upon the spirit of Itsuki Tachibana, who himself strangled his twin Mitsuki to death in the Crimson Sacrifice ritual years ago. While for obvious reasons Fatal Frame II hinges on the relationship between shrine maidens Yae and Sae, they are not the only siblings ripped apart and driven mad by ritual sacrifice. It makes perfect sense then that Sae’s spirit, in the form of a crimson butterfly, lures the emotionally fragile and weak Mayu into the cursed village, preying upon her same fear of abandonment and separation anxiety. Darkness came with her, killing most of the villagers and plunging the village into eternal night where the fateful events replay on repeat until the ritual is properly completed, the curse ensuring nobody will ever be able to leave Sae alone again. Sae’s spirit, potentially brokenhearted and enraged at her abandonment and separation from her sister, burst from the abyss. The ritual failed though, triggering the Repentance.
However, unlike Mayu, Sae was abandoned by her sister, and she allowed herself to be hanged with a noose and thrown into the sacrificial pit alone. Whilst attempting to escape from having to perform the Crimson Sacrifice Ritual, which demands the emotionally stronger twin to strangle the weaker to unite their souls and feed the abyss of the dead, Sae Kurosawa too fell in the process and injured her leg. Unbeknownst to them, Mio and Mayu mirror long dead shrine maiden twins, Yae and Sae Kurosawa, and their presence in the forest will reawaken the cursed All God’s Village, setting in motion an unstoppable chain of events. Mayu suffers a permanent limp and a bandaged leg from her past injury.
Years later, they return to the site of their childhood memories one last time before the construction of a dam floods the area forever.
Though Mio saw this and ran immediately to get help for her sister, Mayu saw her running as a sign that she had been abandoned there in the dirt. The twins were playing on a steep forest path, and in her struggle to keep up with Mio, Mayu slipped and fell into a ravine, injuring her knee. It takes the fear of abandonment, separation anxiety, and the desire to run from its stifling influence and imbues it into an upsetting, deeply personal, and chill-inducing narrative of loss, blood curses, and the oaths of sacrificial lambs.Ĭrimson Butterfly follows twins Mio and Mayu Amakura - the former an independent and protective sister, the latter a girl with abandonment issues caused by an incident with Mio. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly manages this in spades. Horror games seek to evoke real, primal emotion with varying degrees of success. “The two chosen children will be carried to heaven on the wings of a butterfly.”
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